Sep 03, 2020
PanF sunset
by matt
First steps with Ilford PanF Plus 50. This is the slowest film I’ve ever used. Anything but bright sunshine requires a tripod for photos that need even a reasonable amount of depth of field. As I posted on Instagram: After spending over a year in my fridge and me missing a few opportunities, I shot my roll of Ilford Pan F Plus 50 in beautiful Northumberland earlier this month. The film itself is very highly regarded and is praised for its wonderful smooth tones, rich but not overpowering contrast, and very fine grain. What’s not so clear though is what’s best to use for the developer – particularly if, like me, you have Kodak’s HC 110. Ilford recommend 4 mins with HC 110 dilution B, as does the Massive Dev chart. No way I’d develop film for less than 5 mins. Anchell & Troop recommend 5.5 mins with dilution B. Folks on the internet seem to have divided opinions on different dilutions of HC 110, and the length of time to use, and temperature too. I tried to take my time shooting this film on holiday so I wanted to process it as best I could with what I have. After (too) much indecision I decided on using HC 110 dilution F (1:79) at 20 degC for 9.5 mins. I understand that the developer would exhaust quite quickly in such a weak dilution but that the high solvent content of HC110 would hopefully assist with obtaining a reasonable amount of acutance, and therefore hopefully giving me good negs. So it was time to JFDI. The results look pretty good, at least as far as I can tell from the wet negatives :-) They’re now in the queue awaiting scanning :-)
The results are here. And I think they’re great. I’ll definitely be using this film again.